The Finger
The Finger is the fourteenth episode in season two of . Synopsis Catherine gets involved in the kidnapping of a real estate developer's mistress and has to accompany him while he delivers a million dollar ransom. Meanwhile, she tries to leave clues for the other CSIs, who are on her trail. Plot A man, Roy Logan, steps into a bank, looking very antsy, goes to the checkout and makes a withdrawal of $1.000.000. After more than an hour, he is handed a briefcase containing the money and leaves. Well outside, he gets into his car and quickly drives away. A patrol car pulls him over. The officer spots blood on Roy's hands and has him brought in for questioning. Grissom and Catherine are called to the station to collect samples and photograph him. After a while, Roy's lawyer arrives and has him released. Catherine gives Grissom the samples she collected so she can go to Lindsey's school and watch her play "The Girl in the Moon" (The Man in the Moon called in sick). As she is about to leave, she sees that Roy forgot his sunglasses in the room and hurries out to the parking lot to return them. He is angry with her, saying "they" will see her. Just afterwards, his cell phone rings and he picks it up. The caller, who has an extremely high-pitched voice, asks to speak to Catherine. He/she then tells her to drop her things, get in the car with Roy, drive somewhere and await his next call. After they drive away, Roy explains that his mistress, Amanda, has been kidnapped and the money he withdrew is the ransom money. As proof, he shows Catherine a severed finger which he got in the mail. Catherine drives to a nearby diner, where Sara is on a date. She sits down at the counter and orders two glasses of water; one with ice and one without. Not long afterwards, the kidnapper calls again and tells them to go to The Horseshoe Tavern a few miles away. As she leaves, Catherine places the severed finger in a glass of ice and leaves it at Sara's table. Sara quickly returns to the crime lab and briefs the team on the situation. Unfortunately, Dr. Robbins is in Kansas City for his brother's wedding, so they can't examine the finger. Greg confirms that the blood found on Roy's hands did not come from him; it's female. Grissom figures that, since they have no more evidence, all they can do is wait and see. Meanwhile, Catherine and Roy arrive at the Horseshoe Tavern. Outside, the kidnapper, who speaks with a helium-altered voice and wears a bunny mask to conceal his/her identity, tells them to hand over the money and then drive to a gas station. He/she will then call the phone booth and tell them where Amanda is. At first, Catherine refuses to give in without seeing Amanda, but Roy quickly gives him/her the money. The kidnapper then drives away and Catherine and Roy head towards the gas station. When they get there, they find that the phone booth is out of order. Inside the phone book, however, there is a map with an X marked at the Easlesville Reservoir. Meanwhile, Dr. Robbins, having come back to Vegas, examines the finger and determines that Amanda was dead when it was severed. At the reservoir, Roy and Catherine find Amanda's body at the bottom of a drain. She calls Grissom and gives him their location. Back at the lab, Dr. Robbins determines that Amanda was killed ca. 48 hours earlier by blunt/sharp force trauma to the head and finds a small fragment of some kind of rock in the wound. Outside, Catherine meets Roy, who asks to see Amanda. He asks if they know how and where she died before leaving for the Tangiers. At Amanda's home, Catherine and Nick determine that the rock fragment in the wound came from the sharp edge of her marble coffee table. In the apartment is also two wine glasses with lipstick smudges on them. All of the knives in the apartment are in the dish washer, having been cleaned. Examining the scene, Catherine and Nick determine that the body was wrapped in the apartment's shower curtain, which Warrick and Sara find in the sewers close to where Amanda's body was found. In the crime lab's layout room, they find a small cut in it, which is where the finger was severed, and another substance, which Greg identifies as peanut butter. Nick, who was at the Logans' house earlier to talk to the wife, remembers overhearing that Roy had to have his wife's SUV detailed after their son spilled peanut butter and jelly in it. Mrs. Logan is brought in for questioning, with Roy's lawyer present. She admits that Amanda called her over for a drink. She told her that she and Roy would get married. Mrs. Logan tried to set her straight, remarking that Roy would never divorce as it would cost him too much. Roy walked in on them, at which point she left them alone to talk. With no other leads to go on, Grissom turns off the lights in the room; earlier, Catherine had Roy mark the money with a glow-in-the-dark make-up pen which she was going to bring to Lindsey's performance. To their surprise, Mrs. Logan's hands don't glow - the lawyer's do. When they find the bunny mask he wore when he took the ransom money, he confesses that he put it on, accepted the money and made a few phone calls, none of which is, according to him, against any laws. He was instructed to do so by Roy and did as he was told, not bothering to ask any questions and simply assuming that Roy was trying to hide some assets in case of a divorce. He gives them the key to the locker in which he hid the money. While Grissom goes there, Catherine and Brass go to Roy's hotel room. Not unsurprisingly, both he and the money are gone. Back at the crime lab, the CSIs review the case. When Amanda called Mrs. Logan, his infidelity was exposed. After he arrived and she left, Roy and Amanda got into a fight which ended with her death. Realizing that he would lose a lot of money as a result of his divorce and go to jail for killing Amanda, he made up a plan to camoflage the murder as a kidnapping for ransom. Over the following 48 hours, he contacted his lawyer and set up the phone calls, made the occasional call to Amanda's answering machine to make it appear as though he was unaware of her death, wrapped her body in the shower curtain, cut off her finger and took it with him, leaving behind the wine glasses and using his wife's SUV to transport the body in order to cast suspicion onto her. Catherine marking the bills only aided him further; he had figured that the bank would do so after handing him them. Roy knew that the briefcase was too big to fit inside the locker, ensuring that the lawyer would have to touch the dollar bills with his hands to get them inside. His enquiry as to the circumstances of Amanda's death was in order to learn how much they knew. Right when the team figures that Roy is probably long gone with the money, Catherine gets a phone call from a traffic patrol officer, who saw her drive Roy's car earlier. He pulled him over for speeding as he was on his way to Mexico and arrested him for his crimes. At Roy's cell, Catherine admits that she was impressed by the whole setup before leaving him to ponder how his son will feel about what he has done. Cast Main Cast *William Petersen as Gil Grissom *Marg Helgenberger as Catherine Willows *Gary Dourdan as Warrick Brown *George Eads as Nick Stokes *Jorja Fox as Sara Sidle *Paul Guilfoyle as Jim Brass Guest Cast *Eric Szmanda as Greg Sanders *Robert David Hall as Dr. Al Robbins *Christopher Wiehl as Hank Peddigrew *Madison McReynolds as Lindsey Willows *Ty Upshaw as Officer T. Brantley *Tom Irwin as Roy Logan *Al Sapienza as Paul Dennison *Barbara Williams as Diane Logan *J. Robin Miller as Amanda Freeman *Gigi Bermingha as Waitress *Stan Sellers as Bank Manager *Rachel Wolfe as Female Teller Featured Music *'Our Love's in Jeopardy' by Greg Kihn Band. Goofs *Sara says that the finger is severed 'just below the right intercostal joint.' Costal refers to ribs, so such joints are not found in the finger. The finger was actually severed at the metacarpophalangeal joint. *When the LVPD officer stops Roy Logan after he leaves the bank, he notices what looks like blood on Logan's hands. Yet the bank teller and manager in the previous scene apparently never noticed the blood, despite having numerous opportunities during the hour they spent with him, including several close views of his hands (such as when he presented his driver's license). When he was in the bank, blood was also not apparent to viewers, so the makeup department must not have added it during that scene. Notes *Sara is on a date with Hank Peddigrew at a restaurant when Catherine surreptitiously gives her the severed finger. See Also 214 Category:CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Season 2 Episodes Category:Episodes